Anthony eden equals the Suez crisis; Jim Callaghan connotes the "winter of discontent": such are the simplifications and cruelties of national memory. Most prime ministers, especially the short-lived kind, are remembered for a single achievement or, more often, for one defining failure. Few now recollect Eden's general-election win or Callaghan's proto-modernising; some leaders, such as Alec Douglas-Home, are barely remembered at all. Even those who bestride an epoch are eventually reduced to a couple of salient features. In the end "Tony Blair" will evoke Iraq, maybe with a footnote on his constitutional reforms. Bagehot mentions this distillatory effect in order tentatively to advance an unfashionable view. It is that, odd as it now seems, history could one day come to regard Gordon Brown as a rather good prime minister, a much better one than he has been reckoned during his tragicomic premiership. At least, history might. Mr Brown may yet blow his chance of retrospective renown.
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